The La Perouse Mission Church is a heritage-listed former church building and now vacant building and unused church located at 46 Adina Avenue, La Perouse, New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1894 to 1930. It is also known as Colebrook Memorial Aboriginal Evangelical Church. The property is owned by La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 15 March 2013.
History La Perouse is situated south of the Sydney central business district on the northern headland of Botany Bay. Named for a French navigator who stayed in the area for six weeks in 1788, La Perouse is the only Sydney suburb where Aboriginal people have held on to their territory from settlement until the present day. Its history is a story of the survival of the Aboriginal culture in the face of European invasion. It is also the story of a suburb where Aboriginal people and Europeans from a wide variety of backgrounds co-existed and established relationships on their own terms in the mid 20th century outside the prevailing government programs of separation and assimilation.
Indigenous presence at La Perouse, 1870s to 1930s The 1870s marked a change in the nature of the Aboriginal community at La Perouse. Many Aboriginal people who had been forced off their lands on the South Coast by dairy farming moved to Sydney to seek employment or government rations. Informal refuges developed at La Perouse and Blacktown. La Perouse was known to government officials as the "blacks camp".
In the early 1880s, the colonial government was under increasing pressure to take action on Aboriginal affairs. In 1882 Henry Parkes appointed George Thornton as Protector of Aborigines. Thornton believed that Aboriginal people should be removed from urban locations. Yet he did honour the request of five Aboriginal men and their families to be allowed to stay at La Perouse. He justified his decision to Parliament by arguing that the camp was economically viable, in contrast with other camps in Sydney which were seen as parasitic and a nuisance to society. Thornton organised for huts to be built for people camped at La Perouse. By 1881 there were approximately 50 Aboriginal people living in two camps in the Botany Bay region: 35 at La Perouse and the remainder at Botany Bay. Residents were free to travel between the camps.
In 1883 Thornton's position was replaced by the Aborigines Protection Board (APB), which followed a more isolationist and protectionist policy. The Board established Aboriginal reserves, which effectively segregated Aboriginal people from white Australians throughout New South Wales.
In 1885 a small Anglican mission was established at La Perouse. The mission provided religious instruction, food, shelter and basic education. A church was built on Frenchman's Beach in 1894. In 1894, the mission was included in the annual report of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Association.
In 1895 seven acres (2.4 hectares) of land at La Perouse were gazetted by the NSW Government as a "Reserve for the Use of Aborigines"—the only one in Sydney. The APB's decision was partly prompted by the desire of the local Aboriginal people to protect their homes and lifestyle from the encroachment of commercialism and missionaries.
The APB managed the reserve. In the first decades the reserve was run by the resident missionary with a policeman. In later decades (and certainly by the 1940s) there was a resident manager (often a retired soldier or former gaol warden) whose wife would act as the matron. With the introduction of the reserve manager, the resident missionary retained responsibility only for the church and its missionary activities to the community. The manager lived down the hill from the church, separate to the resident missionary. Managers and missionaries worked separately on the reserve. While the reserve managers were generally disliked, the La Perouse Aboriginal community "loved" the resident missionaries (Friends of La Perouse: 2012, pers. comm.).
The Aboriginal population was segregated from the Europeans on the reserve to "protect" them from the white community. They received rations only and no other benefits, which tied them to the reserve. In 1895 the reserve was enclosed by a fence and only the local constable and the resident missionary had a key. Aboriginal people on the reserve were literally locked in. A boom gate was built at the entrance to the reserve which survived into the 1950s.
As late as the 1940s, permission was needed from the reserve manager for an Aboriginal person to enter or leave the reserve. The manager had the right of eviction and entry to all homes on the reserve. In 1918 the APB was granted power to remove Aboriginal children under 18 from the reserves without parental consent if the Board considered removal was in the child's best interestsLa Perouse: 5, 7, 15
The Board provided fishing nets to facilitate self-sufficiency on the reserve, but due to fishing being seasonal around La Perouse many people still travelled to their traditional lands around the Illawarra and South Coast. When the Department of Fisheries introduced a licensing system in New South Wales, Aboriginal people were prevented from selling fish at the markets. They were only able to fish for personal consumption, and even this was restricted by the actions of local fishermen.
The APB was also concerned that Aboriginal people from outside Sydney would travel to La Perouse and from there gain access to the city. Restrictions were therefore placed on Aboriginal people at La Perouse travelling by rail or boat to Sydney.
After 1886 when the Hampden Road "valley" area of Paddington was promoted for "industrial purposes" and population there increased along with pressure for more housing. Aboriginals in the valley and Rushcutters Bay had been transferred to La Perouse by the time of later land sales (1898, 1903).Johnson, 2012
By 1897, the APB had decided that the La Perouse reserve was no longer suitable for Aboriginal occupation. Both the NSW Department of Lands and the missionaries on the reserve disagreed with the APB's decision. They argued that it would be difficult to move the Aboriginal people because of their long history of occupation of the area.
In 1897 the APB rejected requests from missionaries for more huts and increased rations because it was thought that this would encourage more people to move from the South Coast to La Perouse. Nevertheless, by 1900, the APB had decided that it would relocate the Aboriginal people from La Perouse reserve to Wallaga Lake on the South Coast.
The La Perouse residents refused to move, however, even though the APB reduced, and eventually ceased supplying, their rations. By 1902, it seems that the APB had given up its relocation plans and resumed supplying rations to those on the reserve.
In 1908 there were 73 people living on the reserve and new houses were built. By 1912, the reserve's population had grown to 106, and to 124 by 1915.
The APB disliked, but was unable to stop, the increase in the number of non-Aboriginal Australians making day trips to La Perouse following the opening of the tram line from central Sydney to La Perouse in 1910. The La Perouse Aboriginal people participated in the tourist industry, selling boomerangs and other souvenirs, including the famed shellwork produced by the Aboriginal women. From the 1920s until the 1960s, Aboriginal artists and snake show demonstrations were popular, in a pit near the Loop (where the tram line terminated). Beryl Beller remembered collecting shells with her mother to glue onto various cardboard cut-outs and sell to tourists. Lee-Anne Mason recalled waiting in anticipation for the weekend tourists to arrive. People would "be flocking in all day" to watch Mr Cann, the snake man. She also recalled diving for pennies and how she would always manage to catch the penny before it hit the sand.
The La Perouse community also engaged with tourists over the 1932 celebrations for opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Members of the community walked across the bridge in kangaroo skins at its opening. The event is commemorated in La Perouse with the two engravings on the sandstone outcrop just south of the church.pers. comm. 19/5/2012, Friends of La PerouseDEC Aboriginal site card 45-6-873
After World War II the tourists included migrants from Mediterranean Europe who felt an affinity with the La Perouse beach and landscape.
Moving the Aboriginal people from La Perouse re-emerged as an issue during the 1920s when Randwick Council responded to pressure from the South Kensington and District Chamber of Commerce which wrote to the APB expressing concerns about the reserve's housing conditions, sanitation and "morality". The APB agreed that the reserve should be moved. But again, the people on the reserve refused to move. In 1928, a petition signed by 53 reserve residents was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. It read: 'We, the undersigned aborigines of the La Perouse reserve, emphatically protest against our removal to any place. This is our heritage bestowed upon us: in these circumstances we feel justified in refusing to leave'.
As a compromise measure, Randwick Council in 1931 converted the foreshore section of the original reserve into a park and public recreation area, and moved the huts away from the waterfront.
Depression camps at La Perouse, 1930s to 1960s From the start of the Depression in 1929 hundreds of unemployed people moved to La Perouse to camp close to the beaches with access to fresh water, natural shelter and the ocean. Three separate camps for the unemployed were set up at La Perouse. They were Hill 60, Frog Hollow and Happy Valley. Simple huts were erected of corrugated iron roofing, white-washed hessian walls and earth floors. Food was scrounged from the local fishermen and Chinese market gardeners. The government provided one pint of milk per family per day.
Happy Valley was the largest of the camps, with a stable population of over 300. It was located opposite the Aboriginal mission, next to Anzac Parade, in a gully behind Congwong Beach. Frog Hollow was an Aboriginal camp, also near the reserve. Many who set up camp at Frog Hollow were relatives of Aboriginal people living on the reserve. The communities of these two camps enjoyed a good relationship and much interaction with the Aboriginal people on the reserve. Aboriginal-European relationships resulted in many marriages and children. Non-Aboriginal partners, however, were not allowed to live on the reserve.
The camps offered a measure of freedom that was not found on Aboriginal reserves. White and black children attended the same school, which was unusual at a time when government policy aimed to separate Indigenous and European Australians. Children didn't focus on the differences between them. One woman recalled that when someone raised the alarm that 'the welfare's coming' (meaning that the child welfare department had come to take Aboriginal children), both white and black children would run and hide in the bush, the white children unaware that the child welfare department had come only for Aboriginal children.
The camps remained after the Depression eased in 1934. Happy Valley was closed in 1939 by Randwick Council following pressure from the NSW Golf Course. Residents were rehoused and the huts demolished. Post World War II migrants from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Malta and the Middle East who were either unemployed or homeless from the severe post-war housing shortage, joined Aboriginal people from the South Coast at the Frog Hollow and Hill 60 camps. These camps were closed in the 1950s and their occupants rehoused in the La Perouse and Matraville areas. The last huts were demolished in the 1960s.